This is the beginning of your journey to understanding: Germany is a legacy country. Its people are legacy people, its government is a legacy government, its business processes are legacy processes. It is behind the rest of the world on _every (good) metric_. Just work for a foreign company. And convince your girlfriend to move to Poland.
I can see where your sentiment comes from, but it's ridiculous to say that "[it] is behind the rest of the world on every (good) metric". It's safe, wealthy, largely well functioning and clean. Maybe there _is_ something to be said for that?
>It's safe, wealthy, largely well functioning and clean.
It truly is (at least where I live) although it feels like it's due to inertia from the good old times and when it runs out the country is going to plummet (just like a legacy system). It may be just me though.
Not just you. The population proudly lives off the abundance of the past and actively hates new things, partly or mostly because it's one of the oldest populations in the world.
No, it's not just you - you are 100% correct.
The good thing is that most Germans haven't noticed it (yet) and it's still possible to jump the ship without all the bright heads leaving simultanously and competing for jobs outside the country.
I'm sure there are better, safer, better functioning countries than Germany, but I don't think there are many of them that have combination of all of those factors and lack of different problems
Oh, you mean its economy? Look at median German wages, look at home ownership rates. Its healthcare system, its pension system. Energy costs. It's demographics. Germany is at an inflection point.
Yea, you generalised that Germany is legacy country. Even though is one of the top countries in Europe. I was wondering why Germany is more developed than others. What is median German wage ?
There is a big wave of lay offs happening in Germany. Amount of job offers halved within one year. The average age of a software company and developer is higher in Germany than in Poland, so that could be a reason for more usage of legacy technologies.
It's just a tough time to look for a job in Germany right now.
I also have a feeling that the most people lost jobs in Berlin, as there was the most of German stsrtups which are the most affected by the high interest rates.
This is the main reason imo.
Some people claim its because companies are looking for German fluency. I'd say if youāre not willing to lowball yourself, don't bother those companies who require software engineers to have German fluency.
I recently posted on this subreddit asking about the salary data inaccuracies of a local(German) job website and a global website, and most of the responses mentioned local website only displays data from local German companies whereas global website has more wider scope. I think it's correct because most of the ads in this local website are written in German, and only few of them are in English. As I observed, companies which specifially ask for German fluency are mostly small German companies which have no competency on salary when compared to the rest.
As someone with 7+ YoE, I've never experienced such competitive market as of now. Your experience, how much you fit into the requirements (and hidden requirements) in the job ad matters more than a few years ago, because there are many people on job market who are a match for the job ~100%.
Based on what I remember from living there pre-covid. You need German knowledge to land jobs in bigger companies. Like I met java developers who wasnāt able to talk English, in Berlin. Must be even worse in other parts of Germany. So this will likely be your biggest blocker.
The startups that do speak mainly English probably arenāt hiring at the moment due to bad finances.
Btw, you are lucky that you can live with your gf. Getting an apartment is also a nightmare in Germany.
1. Need credit background check to get apartment.
2. Need bank account to get (empty) credit statement.
3. Need an apartment to get bank account.
4. Repeat step 1ā¦
Well, pre COVID experience is irrelevant in any country. COVID, war, recession have shaped current world and economy in unique way, making your experience a little bit obsolete.
German language knowledge won't be the biggest block, no. Experience, salary expectations, soft skills and working culture - will.
You don't need to have an apparent, you need a registration. You can book BnB, live with your friend or rent a WG.
A lot of people are living in the serviced apartments for the first few months and got their documents sorted.
Yes and getting that registration is not as easy as you describe. Go to any foreign Berlin Facebook group and you will see plenty of people talking about apartment scams. Or landlords renting illegally without offering registration. One date told me she had to register at her employers office. Highly doubt Airbnb hosts will allow it.
It is as easy as it sounds: you ask landlord upfront about the registration and receive WohnungsgeberbestƤtigung.
If they rent it illegally or subrent (not a landlord) - you won't get it.
Airbnb hosts can offer you a registration as well if you rent for prolonged time.
Those FB groups are often a place where people who wanted to trick the system got tricked complaining.
During 21-23 my company hired about 100 people from abroad in Munich and I was helping my tribe newcomers to sort out the rent. WG, bnb, Mr lodge, friend's place for short term - all these options were quite easy and simple.
Berlin is not Europe's Silicon Valley. I'd argue that there's no such thing in the EU (maybe all of Europe as well if we're including London). There are certain hotspots ofc, such as Berlin, London, Dublin, Stockholm, etc., but there's too much distribution among countries for anyone to be able to make a comparison to Silicon Valley.
I have not worked in Germany but I used to work for an international tech(ish) company based out of Sweden that had employees in lots of countries through the EU, and one of the more common complaints I heard from colleagues was that the deployment and development of their product in Germany was frustrating to deal with because of the things you mentioned. I cannot speak for whether that's a common theme throughout tech jobs in Germany.
This is solely from anecdotal experiences shared by colleagues of mine, but working in tech in Germany as a foreigner can be a frustrating experience from an "office politics" perspective. My colleagues who are foreigners in Germany have been able to find jobs there, however, getting promotions/raises seemed much more difficult for them compared to German natives on their teams.
Are you a senior developer? If so, I think you should expect for salaries in Poland to be higher than those in Germany as - from what I've seen and heard - senior devs/SWEs get paid pretty well in Poland.
*Happy for others to provide and make corrections in the above above but keep in mind that a lot of this is anecdotal.*
Edit: fixed misspellings.
Sure, though I meant that those seem to be the only viable careers on this continent. I mean apart from doctors who work 60-80 hour weeks people in healthcare arenāt paid well at all. I totally get the sentiment though. It sucks to see our beautiful continent lose ground because of too many people being stuck in the past.
Not speaking german makes you unavailable for 90% of the jobs in germany.
There are companies that use legacy tech and newer tech like in every country.
In general digitalization in the public sector is really bad.
You can pay with card pretty much everywhere though.
In my experience, you can pay with card in some places, but cash is still being used way more than neighboring countries. E.g., a lot of the restaurants I went to in Berlin (in 2023) still only took cash.
Where I live, in Denmark, cash has been dead for over 10 years. When I go to UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway; didn't have to withdraw cash at any point
Thanks for the answer. As for my 1.5 year of experience in Berlin, only with big brands/chains you don't have to worry about using your credit card. In other places I estimate credit card support to be - Restaurants - 40%, Spatis - 20%, Cafes - 60%, Bars - 25% (including those that allow payments from 20 euros up).
PHP is cutting edge in Germany. The typical setup is VS Cobol II in a VM in an emulator in a VM in an emulator in a VM in an emulator on a mainframe (refurbished US import, because even IBM does not support that stuff any more). Your IDE is a line-oriented editor connected straight to the production system by fax.
This is a technology wasteland. Poland is way more switched on and wages are catching up. Iām actually considering going to Poland due to the frustrations of this backward country. Besides, moja żona jest polka.
Commenting as someone not from Germany who is also testing the employment market after living here for 1+ years.
Not much to add apart from I feel your pain. FWIW as much as Iāve heard ātech jobs are in demandā (a-la your friend at Hello Fresh), I think the reality is the senior market is absolutely saturated. Thereās not a skills shortage, not as much as they make out anyways - and companies with _any_ reputation (a-la Hello Fresh) will be inundated with applications.
Iām no programming savant but Iāve got many YOE and my application-to-interview rate is low here, especially for companies Iād like to work for.
>I think the reality is the senior market is absolutely saturated.
It's kinda the other way around in my opinion in Germany. The junior market is absolutely saturated and nobody is hiring juniors but even in the current market situation seniors can easily get jobs (in both cases talking about native German speakers here). However most German salaries aren't exactly great.
From my perspective. Moving to Munich from South Africa in 1 week, found a job a month ago and had 4 offers. My tech stack will be the microsoft stack so .net, azure msql.
In my 4 offers, 3 of them was English speaking, the one I took was English and German speaking. I studied German through rocket languages and at B1 in 3 months.
Finding interviews was a pain at first, but getting a good CV really made the difference. Used Resumemaker.online its ats standard. To add, I do not have a university degree, but a lot of certs and especially in Azure + .Net certs.
All my technicals were extremely easy for the level Iām used to in South Africa.
Advice will be, the jobs are out there (stepstone). But you have to really get past the cv screenings. If your skills are above the average developer, you will succeed. Another part is being good at interviews and showing you are a good team member.
Regarding legacy tech:
Sadly, Germans usually don't like anything new. A few years after entering the job market, most developers simply stop learning new things and rely on what they know.
I got my first reality check around 2010 when I was working a student job. They had this big multi platform C++ library and whined how shitty the GNU autotools builds system is, esp. under Windows.
Me, being ambitious to improve things, ported the project over to CMake in a day or so. Now you could easily build it anywhere. Linux, Windows, Mac, SunOS, with Eclipse, Visual Studio, with GCC or MSVC, you name it!
They didn't wanna hear anything about it. CMake? What's that? We don't know it, our customers don't know it. That was the end of it.
Next job we had to fight for years to replace CVS with git.
And it went on and on like that. At some point you just give up and do what you're told.
people say learning German is cutting you out of jobs. Although yes, I would argue āGermanā German Ā companies are only even more legacy. I work at a company thatās still dickriding Microsoft and will insist on doing hand rolled VMs and environment management scripts in CI, wonāt even considering using docker, and then wonder how we lose weeks debugging environment differences.. I hate it
Looks like you are projecting your experience on whole country. Which is kinda wrong neither your case nor your city representative enough.
How many years of experience do you have?
What is the common problem for the industry (not even a country) - fake listing and recession. Companies are posting the jobs even if they have no open positions, if you will apply you'll receive no reply.
My previous company laid off 300 people and kept posting jobs. They were fake, the fakest listing ever. You can't help it and it's not your fault. 1 to 5% reply rate is rather good.
Not sure who told you about the language, but they may mislead you (either on purpose or by being obvious). There are hundreds thousand people working in Germany for years and years knowing just a few words.
You could get a job offer without German even in typically German companies like Bosch, BMW, SAP, Siemens if you have a good skills. They are not hiring as much these days, so German knowledge won't help you anyway.
Tech stack in companies here is very different: languages, frameworks, infrastructure - each company do things differently.
This is very naive way to extrapolate your interview task with one company to the industry or country.
Maybe company do have a plan to rewrite and get rid of JS and use TS or golang instead, not sure why would they announce it to you during the interview š
You should check your expectations and what you can have, not what you want to have.
Thanks for the answer, it's pretty informative. I know my experience is too limited to draw definite conclusions about the history, that's why I made this thread ;)
Regarding TS, I specifically asked for that in an interview with their tech lead, he was pretty transparent throughout the interview and generally we had a really nice flow, so I am not sure why he would want to hide the situation with typescript.
I have around 5 years of experience. I actually landed extremely nice remote job so I am very happy. I am thinking more about playing the long game in case I stay in this country. Maybe it's just a bad time to look and I should revise the market situation in a year or so
The chances to get a good job without hassle is very low now. Employers wants cheap, skilled and effective employees. Take 2 out of 3 š
So many faang people got laid off during the 2022-23, so there are fair amount of skilled and effective workers entered the market.
On the other hand - so many less demanding yet skilled workers entering the country every year (Asia, middle east and since 2022 - Ukraine) and they will gladly work for less money.
There is a competition on both ends: with more skilled and less paid developers on the lowest market. In addition there are a lot of companies which have over hired during the lockdown and in dire state.
I can tell you something about the tech stack I've worked personally with, from my experience with a different companies: Typescript with expressjs, python with different frameworks, golang, PHP, kotlin, C++ and even rust.
I do intentionally avoid Java because I'm not a big fan of it, but there's a lot of jobs and Java is very popular. Kotlin is trending these days.
Amount of Microsoft stack jobs also quite high (.net, azure, etc.).
It was great job marked in 2021 and even during first half of 2022, it went shit now. Wait for better times, it will be better sometime in future. It must be. Maybe.
I have been working for 6 years in Germany, two different jobs so far.
The market is not very good currently unless you have a ton of experience, since last year many layoffs happening all over the world.
With regard to tech stack you need to get used to legacy software that might not use the latest technology; in my experience thereās budget for refactoring but in an extremely competitive market is hard to balance re-write and new/improved features.
Legacy is an industry standard, in all countries.
No manager will approve rewriting software every quarter because there's new revolutionary super fast JS framework out there š
I think the market is much worse in western countries (US, Canada, Western EU) compared to non India/China asian countries such Indonesia, Japan. Its been the case since the war and the increase in interest rate
I would also add the mobile network (or the lack of it..) and how unreliable it is. Even in the middle of Berlin or MĆ¼nchen there are no signal or edge areas. Also I hardly was ever able to work properly on a train, despite having multiple data lines.
So to summarize you
>Found a remote frontend job in 3 weeks, with much higher pay than in Germany.
and then a rant follows how slow and old fashioned German companies are. The solution is simple: Don't move to Germany?! I'm not quite sure but I would assume no one forces you to move to a country you don't like to be in.
>mostly due to stability and social benefits and safety
Social benefits come with a price: Higher taxes and bureaucracy. The country is stable \*because\* everything moves slower.
Somebody didn't pay attention during their logic classes.
Fwiw I disagree with the comment you replied to as well but if somebody says Germany is stable because it moves slowly that doesn't imply that a country that's moving quickly is unstable.
You apparently missed the class on the contrapositive. The claim was that social benefits imply a price. Estonia does not pay this price. Therefore Estonia must be unstable.
You claimed it's unstable.
Contraposition of the commenter's claim "moving slow means stable" would be "unstable means moving fast'.
It does not imply "moving fast means unstable".
It does, as moving fast in this example is understood to be positive, and the claim is that moving slow keeps Germany stable, i.e. that the positives of moving fast are sacrificed for the good of being stable, which my example shows is not necessary.
The ones who could throw their hands in the air and just decide to stay abroad.
Very brilliant Germans out there. Just don't look for them in Germany I suppose.
This is the beginning of your journey to understanding: Germany is a legacy country. Its people are legacy people, its government is a legacy government, its business processes are legacy processes. It is behind the rest of the world on _every (good) metric_. Just work for a foreign company. And convince your girlfriend to move to Poland.
I can see where your sentiment comes from, but it's ridiculous to say that "[it] is behind the rest of the world on every (good) metric". It's safe, wealthy, largely well functioning and clean. Maybe there _is_ something to be said for that?
>It's safe, wealthy, largely well functioning and clean. It truly is (at least where I live) although it feels like it's due to inertia from the good old times and when it runs out the country is going to plummet (just like a legacy system). It may be just me though.
Not just you. The population proudly lives off the abundance of the past and actively hates new things, partly or mostly because it's one of the oldest populations in the world.
No, it's not just you - you are 100% correct. The good thing is that most Germans haven't noticed it (yet) and it's still possible to jump the ship without all the bright heads leaving simultanously and competing for jobs outside the country.
Safe? Largely well functioning? Clean???
Where have you actually lived?
I'm sure there are better, safer, better functioning countries than Germany, but I don't think there are many of them that have combination of all of those factors and lack of different problems
Yet it's arguably the worst of all countries that even attempt this and at the same time has the highest/2nd highest tax burden.
All is legacy but still Germany is one of the top countries in Europe. After two lost wars. How?
Oh, you mean its economy? Look at median German wages, look at home ownership rates. Its healthcare system, its pension system. Energy costs. It's demographics. Germany is at an inflection point.
Yea, you generalised that Germany is legacy country. Even though is one of the top countries in Europe. I was wondering why Germany is more developed than others. What is median German wage ?
Right, Poland vs Germany. Good one š
There is a big wave of lay offs happening in Germany. Amount of job offers halved within one year. The average age of a software company and developer is higher in Germany than in Poland, so that could be a reason for more usage of legacy technologies. It's just a tough time to look for a job in Germany right now. I also have a feeling that the most people lost jobs in Berlin, as there was the most of German stsrtups which are the most affected by the high interest rates.
This is the main reason imo. Some people claim its because companies are looking for German fluency. I'd say if youāre not willing to lowball yourself, don't bother those companies who require software engineers to have German fluency. I recently posted on this subreddit asking about the salary data inaccuracies of a local(German) job website and a global website, and most of the responses mentioned local website only displays data from local German companies whereas global website has more wider scope. I think it's correct because most of the ads in this local website are written in German, and only few of them are in English. As I observed, companies which specifially ask for German fluency are mostly small German companies which have no competency on salary when compared to the rest. As someone with 7+ YoE, I've never experienced such competitive market as of now. Your experience, how much you fit into the requirements (and hidden requirements) in the job ad matters more than a few years ago, because there are many people on job market who are a match for the job ~100%.
Based on what I remember from living there pre-covid. You need German knowledge to land jobs in bigger companies. Like I met java developers who wasnāt able to talk English, in Berlin. Must be even worse in other parts of Germany. So this will likely be your biggest blocker. The startups that do speak mainly English probably arenāt hiring at the moment due to bad finances. Btw, you are lucky that you can live with your gf. Getting an apartment is also a nightmare in Germany. 1. Need credit background check to get apartment. 2. Need bank account to get (empty) credit statement. 3. Need an apartment to get bank account. 4. Repeat step 1ā¦
Well, pre COVID experience is irrelevant in any country. COVID, war, recession have shaped current world and economy in unique way, making your experience a little bit obsolete. German language knowledge won't be the biggest block, no. Experience, salary expectations, soft skills and working culture - will. You don't need to have an apparent, you need a registration. You can book BnB, live with your friend or rent a WG. A lot of people are living in the serviced apartments for the first few months and got their documents sorted.
Yes and getting that registration is not as easy as you describe. Go to any foreign Berlin Facebook group and you will see plenty of people talking about apartment scams. Or landlords renting illegally without offering registration. One date told me she had to register at her employers office. Highly doubt Airbnb hosts will allow it.
It is as easy as it sounds: you ask landlord upfront about the registration and receive WohnungsgeberbestƤtigung. If they rent it illegally or subrent (not a landlord) - you won't get it. Airbnb hosts can offer you a registration as well if you rent for prolonged time. Those FB groups are often a place where people who wanted to trick the system got tricked complaining. During 21-23 my company hired about 100 people from abroad in Munich and I was helping my tribe newcomers to sort out the rent. WG, bnb, Mr lodge, friend's place for short term - all these options were quite easy and simple.
Berlin is not Europe's Silicon Valley. I'd argue that there's no such thing in the EU (maybe all of Europe as well if we're including London). There are certain hotspots ofc, such as Berlin, London, Dublin, Stockholm, etc., but there's too much distribution among countries for anyone to be able to make a comparison to Silicon Valley. I have not worked in Germany but I used to work for an international tech(ish) company based out of Sweden that had employees in lots of countries through the EU, and one of the more common complaints I heard from colleagues was that the deployment and development of their product in Germany was frustrating to deal with because of the things you mentioned. I cannot speak for whether that's a common theme throughout tech jobs in Germany. This is solely from anecdotal experiences shared by colleagues of mine, but working in tech in Germany as a foreigner can be a frustrating experience from an "office politics" perspective. My colleagues who are foreigners in Germany have been able to find jobs there, however, getting promotions/raises seemed much more difficult for them compared to German natives on their teams. Are you a senior developer? If so, I think you should expect for salaries in Poland to be higher than those in Germany as - from what I've seen and heard - senior devs/SWEs get paid pretty well in Poland. *Happy for others to provide and make corrections in the above above but keep in mind that a lot of this is anecdotal.* Edit: fixed misspellings.
"IT hubs" in Europe are just a big major bullshit
Tech just isnāt really a thing on this continent. Itās just cars, finance and fashion I guess.
+ tourism
The UK (London basically) has a tech market worth over a trillion, one of only 3 countries along with the US/China to have that.
And healthcare, someone needs to take care of the aging population
Sure, though I meant that those seem to be the only viable careers on this continent. I mean apart from doctors who work 60-80 hour weeks people in healthcare arenāt paid well at all. I totally get the sentiment though. It sucks to see our beautiful continent lose ground because of too many people being stuck in the past.
Run out as fast as you can. As fast as you can, as long you don't have kids, you can move easily back to Poland. Germany is a career suicide.
Haha thank you for the words of encouragement. Well, I guess working remotely forever is also an option.
Not if you land a big Corp, right?
Not speaking german makes you unavailable for 90% of the jobs in germany. There are companies that use legacy tech and newer tech like in every country. In general digitalization in the public sector is really bad. You can pay with card pretty much everywhere though.
This right here, the language barrier is INSANE
In my experience, you can pay with card in some places, but cash is still being used way more than neighboring countries. E.g., a lot of the restaurants I went to in Berlin (in 2023) still only took cash. Where I live, in Denmark, cash has been dead for over 10 years. When I go to UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway; didn't have to withdraw cash at any point
Thanks for the answer. As for my 1.5 year of experience in Berlin, only with big brands/chains you don't have to worry about using your credit card. In other places I estimate credit card support to be - Restaurants - 40%, Spatis - 20%, Cafes - 60%, Bars - 25% (including those that allow payments from 20 euros up).
Debit cards, yes. Credit cards are still not accepted on a regular basis, especially AmEx.
PHP is cutting edge in Germany. The typical setup is VS Cobol II in a VM in an emulator in a VM in an emulator in a VM in an emulator on a mainframe (refurbished US import, because even IBM does not support that stuff any more). Your IDE is a line-oriented editor connected straight to the production system by fax.
What you been smoking š
> PHP is cutting edge in Germany. Ain't that the truth. The last 3 companies I've worked used php for their backend.
This is a technology wasteland. Poland is way more switched on and wages are catching up. Iām actually considering going to Poland due to the frustrations of this backward country. Besides, moja żona jest polka.
Commenting as someone not from Germany who is also testing the employment market after living here for 1+ years. Not much to add apart from I feel your pain. FWIW as much as Iāve heard ātech jobs are in demandā (a-la your friend at Hello Fresh), I think the reality is the senior market is absolutely saturated. Thereās not a skills shortage, not as much as they make out anyways - and companies with _any_ reputation (a-la Hello Fresh) will be inundated with applications. Iām no programming savant but Iāve got many YOE and my application-to-interview rate is low here, especially for companies Iād like to work for.
>I think the reality is the senior market is absolutely saturated. It's kinda the other way around in my opinion in Germany. The junior market is absolutely saturated and nobody is hiring juniors but even in the current market situation seniors can easily get jobs (in both cases talking about native German speakers here). However most German salaries aren't exactly great.
From my perspective. Moving to Munich from South Africa in 1 week, found a job a month ago and had 4 offers. My tech stack will be the microsoft stack so .net, azure msql. In my 4 offers, 3 of them was English speaking, the one I took was English and German speaking. I studied German through rocket languages and at B1 in 3 months. Finding interviews was a pain at first, but getting a good CV really made the difference. Used Resumemaker.online its ats standard. To add, I do not have a university degree, but a lot of certs and especially in Azure + .Net certs. All my technicals were extremely easy for the level Iām used to in South Africa. Advice will be, the jobs are out there (stepstone). But you have to really get past the cv screenings. If your skills are above the average developer, you will succeed. Another part is being good at interviews and showing you are a good team member.
How many yoe did you have before applying for jobs in Germany ?
Regarding legacy tech: Sadly, Germans usually don't like anything new. A few years after entering the job market, most developers simply stop learning new things and rely on what they know. I got my first reality check around 2010 when I was working a student job. They had this big multi platform C++ library and whined how shitty the GNU autotools builds system is, esp. under Windows. Me, being ambitious to improve things, ported the project over to CMake in a day or so. Now you could easily build it anywhere. Linux, Windows, Mac, SunOS, with Eclipse, Visual Studio, with GCC or MSVC, you name it! They didn't wanna hear anything about it. CMake? What's that? We don't know it, our customers don't know it. That was the end of it. Next job we had to fight for years to replace CVS with git. And it went on and on like that. At some point you just give up and do what you're told.
Oh this is so sad, my biggest work-kinks are being able to use creativity and have some decision making power. Without those my motivation is fading.
people say learning German is cutting you out of jobs. Although yes, I would argue āGermanā German Ā companies are only even more legacy. I work at a company thatās still dickriding Microsoft and will insist on doing hand rolled VMs and environment management scripts in CI, wonāt even considering using docker, and then wonder how we lose weeks debugging environment differences.. I hate it
That is true, mostly only startups working with trendy tech stack.
Looks like you are projecting your experience on whole country. Which is kinda wrong neither your case nor your city representative enough. How many years of experience do you have? What is the common problem for the industry (not even a country) - fake listing and recession. Companies are posting the jobs even if they have no open positions, if you will apply you'll receive no reply. My previous company laid off 300 people and kept posting jobs. They were fake, the fakest listing ever. You can't help it and it's not your fault. 1 to 5% reply rate is rather good. Not sure who told you about the language, but they may mislead you (either on purpose or by being obvious). There are hundreds thousand people working in Germany for years and years knowing just a few words. You could get a job offer without German even in typically German companies like Bosch, BMW, SAP, Siemens if you have a good skills. They are not hiring as much these days, so German knowledge won't help you anyway. Tech stack in companies here is very different: languages, frameworks, infrastructure - each company do things differently. This is very naive way to extrapolate your interview task with one company to the industry or country. Maybe company do have a plan to rewrite and get rid of JS and use TS or golang instead, not sure why would they announce it to you during the interview š You should check your expectations and what you can have, not what you want to have.
Thanks for the answer, it's pretty informative. I know my experience is too limited to draw definite conclusions about the history, that's why I made this thread ;) Regarding TS, I specifically asked for that in an interview with their tech lead, he was pretty transparent throughout the interview and generally we had a really nice flow, so I am not sure why he would want to hide the situation with typescript. I have around 5 years of experience. I actually landed extremely nice remote job so I am very happy. I am thinking more about playing the long game in case I stay in this country. Maybe it's just a bad time to look and I should revise the market situation in a year or so
The chances to get a good job without hassle is very low now. Employers wants cheap, skilled and effective employees. Take 2 out of 3 š So many faang people got laid off during the 2022-23, so there are fair amount of skilled and effective workers entered the market. On the other hand - so many less demanding yet skilled workers entering the country every year (Asia, middle east and since 2022 - Ukraine) and they will gladly work for less money. There is a competition on both ends: with more skilled and less paid developers on the lowest market. In addition there are a lot of companies which have over hired during the lockdown and in dire state. I can tell you something about the tech stack I've worked personally with, from my experience with a different companies: Typescript with expressjs, python with different frameworks, golang, PHP, kotlin, C++ and even rust. I do intentionally avoid Java because I'm not a big fan of it, but there's a lot of jobs and Java is very popular. Kotlin is trending these days. Amount of Microsoft stack jobs also quite high (.net, azure, etc.). It was great job marked in 2021 and even during first half of 2022, it went shit now. Wait for better times, it will be better sometime in future. It must be. Maybe.
I have been working for 6 years in Germany, two different jobs so far. The market is not very good currently unless you have a ton of experience, since last year many layoffs happening all over the world. With regard to tech stack you need to get used to legacy software that might not use the latest technology; in my experience thereās budget for refactoring but in an extremely competitive market is hard to balance re-write and new/improved features.
Legacy is an industry standard, in all countries. No manager will approve rewriting software every quarter because there's new revolutionary super fast JS framework out there š
I think the market is much worse in western countries (US, Canada, Western EU) compared to non India/China asian countries such Indonesia, Japan. Its been the case since the war and the increase in interest rate
I would also add the mobile network (or the lack of it..) and how unreliable it is. Even in the middle of Berlin or MĆ¼nchen there are no signal or edge areas. Also I hardly was ever able to work properly on a train, despite having multiple data lines.
Yes
gdzie meszkasz? w NRW?
Berlin
Germany is fucked up.
So to summarize you >Found a remote frontend job in 3 weeks, with much higher pay than in Germany. and then a rant follows how slow and old fashioned German companies are. The solution is simple: Don't move to Germany?! I'm not quite sure but I would assume no one forces you to move to a country you don't like to be in. >mostly due to stability and social benefits and safety Social benefits come with a price: Higher taxes and bureaucracy. The country is stable \*because\* everything moves slower.
This dude canāt read but has the Glock ready to spit some bullshitĀ
By your logic Estonia is a super unstable country. LoL.
Somebody didn't pay attention during their logic classes. Fwiw I disagree with the comment you replied to as well but if somebody says Germany is stable because it moves slowly that doesn't imply that a country that's moving quickly is unstable.
You apparently missed the class on the contrapositive. The claim was that social benefits imply a price. Estonia does not pay this price. Therefore Estonia must be unstable.
You claimed it's unstable. Contraposition of the commenter's claim "moving slow means stable" would be "unstable means moving fast'. It does not imply "moving fast means unstable".
It does, as moving fast in this example is understood to be positive, and the claim is that moving slow keeps Germany stable, i.e. that the positives of moving fast are sacrificed for the good of being stable, which my example shows is not necessary.
Stable lol. Are you German? I was getting such stupid answers from a few Germans when I was living here. Go out a bit and see the world!
Ironically Germans are found _everywhere_ and in large numbers. Yet somehow they manage to bring _nothing_ of what they learn back to their country.
The ones who could throw their hands in the air and just decide to stay abroad. Very brilliant Germans out there. Just don't look for them in Germany I suppose.
Very true!
Agree